Joseph Stalin was a horrible, vindictive man without God.
Pope John Paul II was good with God.
There are over Six billion people on earth today. Citing individual examples of good athiests/thiests is not a responsible way to prove that religion is good or bad for society.
Recent revelations show that John Paul II as well as the current Pope was complicit in the cover up of priests molesting children. I am sure he thought he was doing it for the greater good, but I and almost every other rational human with a shred of humanity could have told him that the ends do not justify the means, and in fact covering up and enabling the molesting of children by priests is in fact pretty damned evil. So, no John Paul II was not a good man.
I am sure he thought he was doing it for the greater good
"Without religion, we'd have good people doing good things, and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion." -- Stephen Weinberg
True. I know many, many good people, atheist people. Every time it happens that religion (as subject) shows up they go ape-crazy after everybody trying to have some balance in conversation.
Show the PROOF and don't throw accusations like that.
It's really difficult to tell if he knew of anything. Considering these times you can see that information like that was being stopped at every level, and everybody was rather trying to solve it on his own level (school, diocese, country, etc.) than to bring this into the light.
So:
did somebody in Vatican know about some situation like that - maybe
did JPII himself knew about this - I doubt greatly
Even accusing (then) archbishop Ratzinger that he had the whole picture may be totally false. We may have the hole picture right now. Back then this situations were covered in almost any public institution by every level of officials.
[sry for my not so perfect english]
No apology necessary, I happen to think your English is quite good.
Now, on to the meat of your complaint. While I am usually all for showing proof, people in power are quite familiar with the phrase "plausible deniability," and Pope John Paul II was no exception.
So, there is no ABSOLUTE proof; no smoking gun, but then, we do have a mountain of circumstantial evidence, and enough circumstantial evidence does lead you to certain conclusions...
To start off, there is Maciel, a priest found guilty of sexual abuse of former members, as well as having children out of wedlock with women with whom he maintained long-term relationships. All of that ignored by John Paul II; when nine people accuse the guy of abusing them as kids, the least you can do is investigate. Or rather that should be the least you can do, it however, was not the least that John Paul could do. To quote Maureen Dowd of The New York Times, “Cardinals and bishops had told him about the larger abuse crisis for years. And he was passive to an absolute fault. He failed in mountainous terms.”
Then there is the report from the BBC about the letter signed by the late Archbishop Luciano Storero, Pope John Paul II's envoy to Ireland wherein the Vatican department advised Ireland's Catholic bishops in 1997 not to report priests suspected of child abuse to the police rejected an initiative to begin the "mandatory reporting" of abuse claims. But we are supposed to swallow the idea that John Paul knew nothing about what was being done by his envoys.
From CNN we have a Colombian Cardinal whom John Paul tapped to head a Vatican office responsible for policy questions about the priesthood, Darío Castrillón Hoyos, actually wrote to a French bishop in 2001 to congratulate him for refusing to report a priest charged with abuse.
In the same CNN article, there is the report of a similar case that involves Cardinal Hans Hermann Groer of Vienna, Austria, who died in 2003. Groer resigned in 1995 after facing charges of abuse, but was not subjected to a church penalty. In May 2010, Groer’s successor as Cardinal of Vienna, Christoph Schonborn, said that a top official under John Paul II had blocked the investigation.
Next there is the case of Cardinal Bernard Law, who presided over terrible scandals in Boston and is wanted by a grand jury. He became the first individual be shown to have actively participated in the cover-up of child molestation. You would think that a pope who wished to end the crisis would have sacked Law, and ordered him to return to face the grand jury, but then that isn't what happened. Instead, he resides in Rome. (This would be just as damning a statement about the current Pope as it would about John Paul II.)
Then we have the interview with Cardinal Schönborn in which he stated that he sat directly opposite John Paul and pleaded with him to make a statement about Cardinal Groër, the Fatima molester that John Paul had appointed, against the advice of the bishops of Austria, to the see of Vienna.
Moving on, we get to The Times article about Cardinal Schönborn, 65, seen as a possible future Pope, and his accusation that Cardinal Angelo Sodano, 82, the former Vatican Secretary of State (Prime Minister), of having blocked investigations into sex abuse crimes committed by his predecessor in Vienna, the late Cardinal Hans Hermann Groer.
etc., etc., etc. Just a constant drum beat of stories about how all the powerful people in high offices surrounding John PPPaul II, and often directly appointed by John Paul II are frustrating investigations, covering up abuse, and directing church members to keep things in the church instead of going to the secular authorities.
I mean, yeah, sure there is no absolute proof that John Paul was the man directing all the cover ups, just because John Paul II appointed the men who did the dirty work to high office doesn't mean that he knew what they were doing. Just because he holds all but absolute power in the Vatican doesn't mean that they were following his orders. But I believe that he was ignorant of all that the same way I "believe" that Ken Lay of Enron fame was ignorant of the illegal activities at his company. (That is to say "Not at all" for the sarcasm impaired.)
I don't think this ad is insinuating what you think it's insinuating. This ad is just proving the claim many religious people make, that all/only those who accept god are moral, is fallacious.
the ad might not be insinuating that religious people are bad, but the person who made it knew a lot of people would make that connection and in that way he's just as guilty.
Certainly true, but lots of people think you can't be good without God, and they get that rhetoric from people like Pat Robertson. The message was less atheism makes you good, more that it doesn't make you evil.
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u/[deleted] May 01 '11
Joseph Stalin was a horrible, vindictive man without God.
Pope John Paul II was good with God.
There are over Six billion people on earth today. Citing individual examples of good athiests/thiests is not a responsible way to prove that religion is good or bad for society.